makehistory - Initialize or rebuild INN history database

makehistory [-abeFIOx] [-f filename] [-l count] [-T tmpdir] [-s size]

makehistory rebuilds the history(5) text file, which contains a list of Message-IDs of articles already seen by the server. It can also be used to rebuild the overview database. Note that the dbz(3) indexes for the history file are rebuilt by makedbz(8), not by makehistory as in earlier versions of INN.

The default location of the history text file is pathdb/history; to specify an alternate location, use the -f flag.

By default, makehistory will scan the entire spool, using the storage manager, and write a history line for every article. To also generate overview information, use the -O flag.

WARNING: If you're trying to rebuild the overview database, be sure to stop innd(8) and delete or zero out the existing database before you start for the best results. An overview rebuild should not be done while the server is running. Unless the existing overview is deleted, you may end up with problems like out-of-order overview entries, excessively large overview buffers, and the like.

If ovmethod in inn.conf is CWovdb, you must have the ovdb processes running while rebuilding overview. ovdb needs them available while writing overview entries. You can start them by hand separate from the rest of the server by running ovdb_init; see ovdb_init(8) for more details.

-a

Append to the history file rather than generating a new one. If you append to the main history file, make sure innd(8) is throttled or not running, or you can corrupt the history.

-b

Delete any messages found in the spool that do not have valid Message-ID headers in them.

-e

Compute Bytes headers which is used for overview data. This option is valid only if -O flag is specified and overview.fmt includes CWBytes:.

-f filename

Rather than writing directly to pathdb/history, instead write to filename.

-F

Fork a separate process to flush overview data to disk rather than doing it directly. The advantage of this is that it allows makehistory to continue to collect more data from the spool while the first batch of data is being written to the overview database. The disadvantage is that up to twice as much temporary disk space will be used for the generated overview data. This option only makes sense in combination with -O. With CWbuffindexed, the CWoverchan program is invoked to write overview.

-I

Don't store overview data for articles numbered lower than the lowest article number in active. This is useful if there are for whatever reason old articles on disk that shouldn't be available to readers or put into the overview database.

-l count

This option specifies how many articles to process before writing the accumulated overview information out to the overview database. The default is CW10000. Since overview write performance is faster with sorted data, each batch gets sorted. Increasing the batch size with this option may further improve write performance, at the cost of longer sort times. Also, temporary space will be needed to store the overview batches. At a rough estimate, about 300 * count bytes of temporary space will be required (not counting temp files created by sort(1)). See the description of the -T option for how to specify the temporary storage location. This option has no effect with CWbuffindexed, because CWbuffindexed does not need sorted overview and no batching is done.

-s size

Size the history database for approximately size pairs. Accurately specifying the size is an optimization that will create a more efficient database. (The size should be the estimated eventual size of the history file, typically the size of the old file, in lines.)

-O

Create the overview database as well as the history file. Overview information is only required if the server supports readers; it is not needed for a transit-only server (see enableoverview in inn.conf(5)). If you are using the CWbuffindexed overview storage method, erase all of your overview buffers before running makehistory with -O.

-T tmpdir

If -O is given, makehistory needs a location to write temporary overview data. By default, it uses pathtmp, set in inn.conf, but if this option is given, the provided tmpdir is used instead. This is also used for temporary files created by sort(1) (which is invoked in the process of writing overview information since sorted overview information writes faster). By default, sort usually uses your system temporary directory; see the sort(1) man page on your system to be sure.

-x

If this option is given, makehistory won't write out history file entries. This is useful mostly for building overview without generating a new history file.

Here's a typical example of rebuilding the entire history and overview database, removing broken articles in the news spool. This uses the default temporary file locations and should be done while innd isn't running (or is throttled).

    makehistory -b -f history.n -O -l 30000 -I

This will rebuild the overview (if using CWbuffindexed, erase the existing overview buffers before running this command) and leave a new history file as CWhistory.n in pathdb. To preserve all of the history entries from the old history file that correspond to rejected articles or expired articles, follow the above command with:

    cd /usr/local/news/db
    awk 'NF == 2 { print }' < history >> history.n

(replacing the path with your pathdb, if it isn't the default). Then look over the new history file for problems and run:

    makedbz -s `wc -l < history` -f history.n

Then rename all of the files matching CWhistory.n.* to CWhistory.*, replacing the current history database and indexes. After that, it's safe to unthrottle innd.

For a simpler example:

    makehistory -b -f history.n -I -O

will scan the spool, removing broken articles and generating history and overview entries for articles missing from history.

To just rebuild overview:

    makehistory -O -x -F

inn.conf

Read for pathdb, pathtmp, and other settings.

pathdb/history

This is the default output file for makehistory.

pathtmp

Where temporary files are written unless -T is given.

Originally written by Rich CW$alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews and updated by various other people since.

$Id: makehistory.8,v 1.37.2.1 2003/07/12 19:26:57 rra Exp $

dbz(3), active(5), history(5), inn.conf(5), ctlinnd(8), innd(8), makedbz(8), ovdb_init(8), overview.fmt(5).